Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Year-End Polls and New Releases

Late December can only mean one thing in the world of film journalism: the annual proliferation of year-end lists and polls. The latest of these rankings to seek my participation are the Village Voice's annual survey (click here for my ballot) and The L Magazine's composite top 20 list (for which I contributed blurbs of numbers 16 and 18 and Independencia in the runner up section). Also for The L Magazine, I reviewed Terry Gilliam's latest The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, while Slant has re-posted my consideration of Police, Adjective, written during that film's run at the New York Film Festival.

4 comments:

That's a great review of Police, adj. Also, despite my disdain for the Village Voice list as a whole, I have to say that your ballot is probably the best such ballot I've seen this year. I mean, if I made a top ten list of top ten lists, I'd definitely put your list in the top five.

That list at L Magazine is more interesting than the one at the Village Voice but, it's like, I'm always looking for someone to explain to me what was good about, say, The Hurt Locker, Public Enemies, Up, etc. and nobody can ever seem to say anything good about them that means anything.

Thanks, Ricky, for your kind words on my Police, Adjective review and my VV ballot. As for The Hurt Locker, Public Enemies, and Up, I don't really dislike them (well, maybe Up), but mostly they just seem like well-crafted, largely empty exercises. That said, The Hurt Locker at least has its moments of in-the-moment excitement, though it doesn't strike me as nearly as rich a film as many others that came out this year.

One collective year-end list that I'm fond of is the one I participated in at Slant Magazine.

Yeah, I was just looking that over. I've been watching the lists on Metacritic.com and checking out the ones posted in the Notebook section of theauteurs.com and I've seen so many lists that all look exactly the same, with a couple of decent films for credibility's sake and then the standard list of well-crafted empty exercises. Not only to I generally like the selection of films on the Slant list, but I also think the blurbs are much more thoughtful than I've seen just about anywhere.